Now that the bird’s-eye view has passed from metaphor into reality it is a little disappointing, cooking over the literature of flight, to find that so little of the mental freedom and expansion implied in the phrase has been realized in practice. Our records of the air, vigorous and various as they are, seem to be curiously lacking in an arresting significance. Surely, now that some few of the species have hung and sped five miles above this perplexed and perplexing planet, some revolutionary news of man, man’s heart and destiny, and man’s tenure of life on the spinning globe, might be leaking through. Many explanations might be given of this apparent flatness in the plural noun: communiqués which reach us from the sky. At the moment, airmen are mechanic-adventurers. Uncertain of their liaison between earth and air, struggling to maintain and extend a material equilibrium in the new medium, bound to the transport of goods and of instruments of destruction, they are not yet free to rest on the wing, to look down in a penetrating transport of spirit, to brood and dream. This is perhaps only to say that airmen are not poets and poets are not airmen. Here and there, however, it may happen that a poet gets into the air, or a man, adding five miles of a new dimension to his stature, may rub his eyes and find that he is a poet. It is then that the bird’s-eye view becomes a powerful extension of the spirit, foreshadowing what may come when men are free to look down simultaneously into their hearts and upon their earthly home.
In this record of his experiences as an air mail pilot M. de Saint-Exupéry gives an exquisite demonstration of what may be worked from this vein of the human spirit. Rash as it may be to assess a writer’s calibre in translation (even when that is as sensitive as Mr. Galantière’s work) it is safe to say that M. de Saint-Exupéry is a poet, though he chooses to write in prose. This is palpably a book of visions and dreams. Mr. de la Mare, had he been an airman, might have written it, and some of its pages would grace his anthology of dreams. We meet M. de Saint-Exupéry first as a newly trained pilot of Air France, jogging over the cobbles of Toulouse in an early morning omnibus full of the common, surly clay of the petit bourgeois. He is bound for the airport, for his first flight over Spain to the Sahara. He is taking his dreams, his hungers, his unrestfulness into danger, into the mountain-peopled air. They have subdued theirs to the safe humdrum of home and office. He has a vocation (it is one of his main themes to strip the verbiage surrounding the airman’s job, and find out what it really amounts to); they have not.
But he does not forget that his clay is common with theirs, that when he is done with his five miles of vertical freedom he will come down from the stars and share their bowls of milk and coffee. Nor does he forget them. He looks down at their clotted habitations in two continents. They turn up again and again as his vision swings from Patagonia to industrial France, to Madrid and Barcelona in the first months of the civil war. In Spain, something had swept them out of their routine. What had turned the bookkeeper of Barcelona into the sergeant ready to die before Madrid, where the firing line was horribly twisted through the hearts of brother and brother?
M. de Saint-Exupéry’s answer is characteristic of the illumination, sharp but never final, which his images awake:—
When the wild ducks or the wild geese migrate in their season, a strange tide rises in the territories over which they sweep. As if magnetised by the great triangular flight, the barnyard fowl leap a foot or two into the air and try to fly. The call of the wild strikes them with the force of a harpoon and a vestige of savagery quickens their blood. All the ducks on the farm are transformed for an instant into migrant birds, and into those hard little heads, till now filled with humble images of pools and worms and barnyards, there swims a sense of continental expanse, of the breadth of seas and the salt taste of the ocean wind. The duck totters to right and left in its wire enclosure, gripped by a sudden passion to perform the impossible and a sudden love whose object is a mystery. Even so is man overwhelmed by a mysterious presentiment of truth, so that he discovers the vanity of his bookkeeping and the emptiness of his domestic felicities.
M. de Saint-Exupéry and his readers are lucky because his work took him over the deserts of the Sahara and the snows of the Andes, regions in which man’s life is sparse but intense, and where the bones of his planet and his efforts to find a lodgment on it can be seen (if one has the brooding and penetrating eye of this author) from the air. He writes a direct and terrible narrative of a long-distance flight which ended by a crash in the night into a black swelling of the Libyan sands. This is a haunting description of the physical symptoms, the mirages and hallucinations which mark the approach of death by thirst, and of his miraculous rescue by an Arab caravan.
Accident flings him alone on his back on a Saharan plateau with nothing to contemplate but danger and the stars; he dreams of a sempstress of his childhood’s home, and searches for meteorites. He discovers the secret life of the desert among the marauding tribes, and delivers its secret in the tale of a dragonfly, or of Moorish chieftains amazed and aghast at a waterfall in Savoie, or of Bark, a freeman of Marrakesh, who became a slave of the Moors and was freed by the good offices of Air France. M. de Saint-Exupéry’s light is not a steady one; he is more of a poet than a philosopher, while attempting to be both; but he touches nothing which he does not illuminate.
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